Retired civil servant Rachel Cartland tells Kate Whitehead about being one of few women in the Hong Kong government in the 1970s, experiences remembered the memoir Paper Tigress My roots are in rural Buckinghamshire (southeast England), which is where my parents’ families come from. My mother’s side were farmers and my father had been part of a family brickmaking business. He managed to quarrel with everybody in both families, so we were rootless for the first eight years of my life, going around the country looking for new ways to make his fortune and by and large not succeeding.
My younger sister, Alicia, and I had minimal contact with the (extended) family and other people and were reliant on each other. We are still close. My father had a romantic idea about being by the seaside and in 1959, when I was nine, we moved to Portsmouth.
It wasn’t a chic seaside resort at all but a working dockyard servicing the navy. A fair chance The great piece of good luck for me was that there was a very good girls’ school there, Portsmouth High School. It was a fee-paying school for the middle classes but thanks to the direct grant scheme, 50 per cent of its places were open to students to get in on the basis of exams and so I was able to go there.
The teachers believed that families with not much ought to have a fair chance. I loved the artsy subjects – English, history, French – and was very studious. One of my happiest memories is of being given the new A-level books for French and thinking, “Wow, these look so fabulous.
I’m going to spend two years reading these books, isn’t it wonderful!” Portsmouth High School was a life-changing thing because now and again it sent people to Oxford and Cambridge, and that was how I got to Oxford University in 1969. The #MeToo movement of recent years was a bit of an eye-opener because you look back and think, ‘My gosh, what a lot of rubbish I had to put up with’ Making the right noises My charismatic, well-meaning headmistress advised me to take philosophy, politics and economics. Although I enjoyed bits of it, I was a typical arts person , always struggling with maths, and there’s quite a lot of maths in economics.
I got involved in student politics and was president of the Junior Common Room. It was a time of tremendous ferment. British students were obsessed with the war in Vietnam and the American civil rights movement.
On the more local level, feminism was really important. There was a tremendous struggle we were involved in about the future of Oxford. Women couldn’t apply to the big men-only colleges like Magdalen and Christ Church and we were pushing for the colleges to go coed.
Foot in the door The university appointments board told me about the Administrative Service in Hong Kong. I thought it sounded perfect – they paid well in graduate terms, it was overseas and exciting, and it was admin. I did an interview in the Foreign Office in London and was told as long as I got a second-class degree I could come.
I arrived in Hong Kong in September 1972. I was one of a batch of seven expat recruits. Liz King (later Bosher) and I arrived within days of each other and were the only expat women (in the Hong Kong civil service).
Feminism was so important in those days. We weren’t that far away from the years when people thought women couldn’t do senior jobs and we were thinking, “We’ve got a mission to prove that we can do it.” We weren’t the only women – there were loads of distinguished locals who were in their middle career, people like Anson Chan and Libby Wong.
The #MeToo movement of recent years was a bit of an eye-opener because you look back and think, “My gosh, what a lot of rubbish I had to put up with.” You felt it was the price you had to pay to get a foot in the door. Him more than her {"@context":"https://schema.
org","@type":"ImageObject","caption":"View from balcony in the Hermitage, 1973. Photo: Handout","url":"https://img.i-scmp.
com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=contain,width=1024,format=auto/sites/default/files/d8/images/canvas/2024/08/26/550caafb-f3c9-4e1f-aa70-91e6598279b3_98bc6306.jpg"} View from balcony in the Hermitage, 1973. Photo: Handout I was put up in a place at the junction of Kennedy Road and MacDonnell Road called The Hermitage, which was the most misnamed building ever.
It was bedsitter luxury for single administrative people, police officers and teachers. It was a lot of fun. We had six months of intensive Cantonese and then spent six months in the Kowloon City District Office.
It was an interesting introduction to Hong Kong. In 1973, (British missionary) Jackie Pullinger, who was working in the Walled City, wanted to meet somebody who dealt with social-welfare issues. I introduced her to Michael Cartland, who was in the Social Services Policy branch, but him more than her as it were.
Michael and I got married in 1976. Tests of time {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"ImageObject","caption":"Rachel Cartland performing the opening ceremony of the social services centre in the Kowloon Walled City, 1973.
Photo: courtesy Rachel Cartland","url":"https://img.i-scmp.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=contain,width=1024,format=auto/sites/default/files/d8/images/canvas/2024/08/26/862eb7a4-8d82-48a1-aca0-aca3b44a27b5_ff005bf2.
jpg"} Rachel Cartland performing the opening ceremony of the social services centre in the Kowloon Walled City, 1973. Photo: courtesy Rachel Cartland In 1973, I went to the New Territories administration headquarters. It was a time of ferment because of the new towns being built.
(Murray) MacLehose really was a consequential governor for Hong Kong. Almost all the things he did have stood the test of time. I still feel good about how the new towns were planned, though economically it probably wasn’t sensible.
We thought you would have these places as self-contained factory towns where people would live in the public housing, work in the factories and have lots of things to do in their spare time within the town. But Hong Kong was slowly transforming into a service economy, where people needed to come into the central business district to work. Everything seemed quite amateur at the time.
The Philharmonic had only just gone professional. It was a bit wobbly and we were doing our best to shore it up Sowing seeds (Chief secretary) David Akers-Jones, a mentor and later a dear friend, advised me to go to the Finance Branch, which was seen as the challenging peak workwise. I went to the Finance Branch just after 1976.
I was looking after the whole education and medical budgets; it was a fabulously exciting time. We all worked very hard without thinking twice about it. We didn’t realise quite how special it was because it was as if every time you put down a twig it would grow into an enormous tree.
Hot in Yuen Long {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"ImageObject","caption":"David Akers-Jones gives Rachel Cartland away when she married Michael Cartland in July 1976. Photo: courtesy Rachel Cartland","url":"https://img.
i-scmp.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=contain,width=1024,format=auto/sites/default/files/d8/images/canvas/2024/08/26/004db849-075c-4ce2-8abd-8c720e4dbeae_4d106da8.jpg"} David Akers-Jones gives Rachel Cartland away when she married Michael Cartland in July 1976.
Photo: courtesy Rachel Cartland MacLehose said Michael should go and get some mud on his boots, so he became district officer for Yuen Long. There was a house for the district officers called Dunrose. It was a 1920s bungalow with a big veranda and an established garden.
It was beautiful, but down a valley so there wasn’t much breeze and it was incredibly hot. We had ceiling fans and mosquito coils burning all the time. We lived there three or four years.
Our son was born in 1979 while we were living in Dunrose. It was the time of the Vietnamese refugee crisis, so Michael suddenly got yanked out to deal with that and we moved to Borrett Road, in Mid-Levels. It was while we were living there, in 1982, that our daughter, Caroline, was born.
Heart in art In 1984, Michael got posted to Geneva as head of the Hong Kong Government Office there. I took unpaid leave for four years. When I came back, I was given a choice to go into transport or the arts.
I had no sense of direction or interest in roads, so I chose arts. I really enjoyed it. You do need to like the arts if you’re going to do arts policy because it’s time consuming – you need to go to a lot of performances as well as meetings.
Everything seemed quite amateur at the time. The Philharmonic had only just gone professional. It was a bit wobbly and we were doing our best to shore it up.
I look back and think, “Wow, it really did work.” Fringe Benefits One of the things we did quite early on was to salvage the Arts Festival and the Ballet because they both ran into massive financial crises for separate reasons. We had internal debates about whether to let them go and did we really need a ballet company? I went to the deputy financial secretary and said we need X million to plug the hole.
In those days, the finance committee tended to broadly agree with whatever the government said to them. The Fringe Club was in a nascent stage. Michelle Garnaut wanted to run a restaurant there.
People within government said you couldn’t let an arts organisation make money out of a restaurant. I said it was a good idea, it was an indirect subsidy to the arts. Often things that you achieve in government are to do with internal arguing and not giving up.
And so, M at the Fringe began, and it was successful and popular for years. Conduit Connection {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"ImageObject","caption":"Rachel Cartland, assistant director of social welfare (social security), at the Legco’s Panel on Welfare Services meeting.
Photo: SCMP","url":"https://img.i-scmp.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=contain,width=1024,format=auto/sites/default/files/d8/images/canvas/2024/08/26/abc53982-5d5a-4188-b137-45a17fd13306_55ea79d2.
jpg"} Rachel Cartland, assistant director of social welfare (social security), at the Legco’s Panel on Welfare Services meeting. Photo: SCMP As 1997 loomed, they didn’t know what to do with expats. So many people were emigrating pre-1997 and they had a lot of gaps in the Social Welfare Department.
I took a two-rank demotion to do that. Before I’d been in the secretariat dealing with high-powered broadcasting policies and had about four people working for me. Then I took this downwards move and (as assistant director of Social Welfare) had 2,000 staff working for me.
Instead of being a policy thinking and writing job, it was much more a what’s actually happening job. I was there for about nine years until I retired from government in 2006. In 2001, we had to leave our government quarters on Mansfield Road on The Peak.
We were super lucky because it was a down time in the property market and we bought on Conduit Road and have stayed there since. That makes all the difference to the decision about whether to stay in Hong Kong or not. That is it? Lots of retired civil servants set up a consultancy and that’s what we did.
I’ve done some consultancy work, but I’m not a very active consultant. I got lured into writing my memoir, which took me ages – Paper Tigress: A Life in the Hong Kong Government (2013). And I’ve said yes to lots of voluntary work including The Women’s Foundation, Hong Kong Society for the Blind, China Oxford Scholarship Fund and City Chamber Orchestra.
The whole family is in Hong Kong, which is lovely. One thing Hong Kong does teach you is that you’ve got to be pragmatic. You’ve always got to be ready to pack up and go if necessary.
Our whole life is here, a great big web of family and friendships, great memories, but if necessary, you’ve always got to be ready to say, “That is it.” But we are certainly not planning to do that..
